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Torture was an abstract word to me

8:39 pm By la Macha · Health| Immigration| Iraq War| race

23 Feb 2009

The latest Gitmo prisoner to be released is Binyam Mohamed of Britian. As with previous men who were held at the prison for years without ever being allowed a day in court, Mohamed was charged but never went to trail. He is now asserting that he was subjected to torture (including forced feeding when he was on hunger protests), and actually initially cooperated with British intelligence. Imagine his horror to find out that British intelligence was handing everything he was saying to it over to the U.S.:

From the Guardian

Andrew Dismore, chairman of parliament’s joint human rights committee, said he would lead a private meeting today to consider where their inquiry goes next. Separately, Mike Gapes, chairman of the Commons foreign affairs committee, said: “We will be pursuing the issue with ministers,” adding that his cross-party group had been trying to discover the UK’s role in the rendition of terror suspects for years. His committee intended to question David Miliband, the foreign secretary, and the Foreign Office minister Lord Malloch Brown, over what he called “outstanding issues”. He said they included “rendition, what happened to people in Guantánamo Bay and black sites” – a reference to prisons in Afghanistan and elsewhere.

In the prepared statement issued as he landed in the UK, Mohamed said: “I have to say, more in sadness than in anger, that many have been complicit in my own horrors over the past seven years … I realised in Morocco that the people who were torturing me were receiving questions and materials from British intelligence. I had met with British intelligence in Pakistan. I had been open with them. Yet the very people who I had hoped would come to my rescue, I later realised, had allied themselves with my abusers.”

The high court has heard evidence of British security and intelligence officials’ involvement in secret interrogations endured by Mohamed. What two judges have described as “powerful evidence” relating to Mohamed’s treatment is being suppressed under pressure from Miliband and the US authorities.

Every single solitary one of the men who have been released have spoken of some type of torture–whether it be forced feeding, beatings or sleep deprivation. Will we in the U.S. listen to them and demand that our government at least *pay* these people for the years stolen and the bodies damaged? Will we demand this knowing that if these men can’t get accountability from our government, there’s no way on earth *we’ll* ever be able to?

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